"Pure" Greek myths?

The case of Mount Olympus

As I work on my manuscript THE INVENTION OF GREEK MYTHOLOGY, I am always on the lookout for new supports for my thesis that Greek myths did not rise like Athena full-grown from the heads of Greek geniuses, but were in fact an alloy of different story traditions and cultures, Greek and otherwise, throughout the Eastern Mediterranean.

This is actually not all that controversial of a topic among scholars, but there is a sense in which the “pure Greek genius” idea refuses to die.

One of the most durable legends about the beginning of the Greek myths is that they came from a mythical group of people called the Indo-Europeans.

This is an actual, astonishing, pretty super-duper incredible language family—a family that includes not only Latin and Greek, but also south Asian languages like Sanskrit and then all the way west through Europe to the British Isles with languages like German, Russian, and Irish. All these tongues have a common root that goes back thousands of years.

So far, so good.

But since the nineteenth century, when the idea of the Proto-Indo-European language family was discovered, scholars have also been wondering whether there was a Proto-Indo-European religion and story culture.

And a lot of them concluded that there was, indeed, and that this pure strain of human thought is the genius that gave birth to the glory that is the Greek myths.

The problem is that no one knows what the original Indo-Europeans actually believed, because there are no written records of them and therefore no certain archeological remains.

Here’s one evergreen theory: the original Indo-Europeans were nomadic cattle herders who lived on the steppes of South Russia. From that central location, groups of them migrated westward, southward, and eastward to India, the Mediterranean, and Europe.

These, so some say, must be the original Greeks, the “pure” Greeks. These were the people who, after all, spoke Greek when they entered Greece from elsewhere. So these must be the people who invented the Greek myths.

If you can prove an Indo-European origin for a Greek myth, that somehow valorizes the whole idea of purity. And what you can do is to compare the stories of the many Indo-European languages and try to find similarities. If the compared stories are really, really similar, then there must be a common ancestor story that has, after a fashion, survived thousands of years, thousands of miles of distance, and thousands of new cultural realities in its daughter societies.

These must be the Greeks, the real Greeks, the pure Greeks.

On the basis of all this, there is a further theory of the archetypal Indo-European cattle-stealing myth, one Greek incarnation of which is the story of the god Hermes who steals the cattle of Apollo.

But this type of story is pretty rare. In fact, we find that the Indo-European comparative method is spectacularly inefficient for finding the origins of most Greek myths and religious beliefs. 

Let’s take one of the most classic elements of Greek Mythology as an example: that the so-called Olympian divinities live on a mountain called Mount Olympus. It is one of the highest in Greece and it is quite picturesque, with snow on its peaks in the winter.

We assume that Hermes and Apollo live on this mountain, and that when Zeus judges in the criminal case of Hermes v. Apollo, once Hermes’ crime of cattle-stealing has been uncovered, the case is heard on the selfsame mountain.

Is it possible that a nomadic, cattle-herding people who lived on the vast, windswept plains of the South Russian steppes, would have located their most important gods and goddesses on a lofty mountain?

Would they even know what a mountain was?

Take the example of the Dinka, a group of cattle-herding people from the plains of Saharan Sudan. Do their traditional tales envision a high mountain where their divinities live?

Well, they do have a pantheon of divinities, and a storm god named Deng. 

But no mountain.

Why would there be a mountain of the gods in a culture that had no mountains?

Now look to the neighbors of Greece.

All over the eastern Mediterranean, storm gods lived on mountains. The most famous of the storm gods is Jahweh, the god of the Israelites, whose dwelling place was Mount Sinai or Mount Horeb. But we also have Baal, the storm-god of the Canaanites, whose home was Mount Zaphon (Jebel al-Aqra, on the coast of the Mediterranean near the border between modern Syria and Turkey).

The Hurrian-Hittite (Anatolia-modern Turkey) storm god, Teshub, is often pictured astride the shoulders of two mountain gods. Teshub’s son, Sarumma, is a mountain god.

The Minoans, non-Greek people who were living on the island of Crete when we see

the first evidence of Greek speakers in Greece, definitely worshipped goddesses who lived on mountains. A famous cylinder seal shows a goddess standing on top of a mountain with a temple and worshipper below.

Mount Ida, on Crete, is a mythical dwelling place for the god Zeus when he was a baby.

Many places of worship in Bronze Age Crete were found on top of mountains: the so-called “peak sanctuaries.”

And the name Olympus? Well, according to scholars it is “without a doubt” non-Greek.

Now, you could discount all of this evidence that suggests that non-Greeks inspired the Greek idea of Olympus as a dwelling place for the immortals. You could theorize that Greek speakers of Indo-European origin, having detached themselves from their language-mates in the steppes of South Russia, could have just wandered into Greece with their cattle, looked up at the mountains that they saw, and said, “Look up there! Clouds and snow. That must be the place where our storm god lives.” And then they asked the non-Greek people in the neighborhood what the name of the biggest mountain was, and the non-Greek people said “Olympus,” and the rest, so to speak, is history.

Sure. Anything’s possible. 

But I think the answer is a lot simpler than that.

I think it’s time we just said that Greek myths are those myths that Greeks wrote down at some point and told or performed or sang or any combination of the three. And let’s further say that wherever the Greeks came from, when they got to Greece they decided to make use of lots of the cultural material that was already there or nearby, and combine with their own beliefs and tales and transform all that into what became Greek myths. 

That includes the idea that a mountain is where the storm-god and his family live.

No need for purity, silos, or tribalism.

I like that.